Southeast Asian insurtech Igloo has tapped a veteran of Grab and Alibaba for chief business officer.
Igloo appointed Wilson Tseng to drive the commercial strategy, expand partnerships with business and insurer partners and identify new revenue streams, the insurtech said in a press release Thursday.
Tseng has previously held senior roles at superapp Grab and Alibaba, Igloo said, citing his experience in commercial strategy and partnership expansion. Igloo said Tseng played a key role in expanding Grab’s commercial team in Southeast Asia, across the marketplaces, payments and ads businesses.
Scaling Up
Tseng, who will report to CEO and Co-Founder Raunak Mehta, will work with the commercial teams in Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia to improve existing partnerships, the release said. He will also work with the product, engineering and insurance teams on new initiatives, products and services for all markets and product lines, Igloo said.
Mehta, who took on the CEO and Co-Founder roles earlier this month after the insurtech raised $19 million in a series B funding round, called Tseng’s onboarding timely as Igloo prepares to scale up in Southeast Asia, while also building an engineering center in India.
«Wilson brings a wealth of commercial partnerships expertise from a diverse career spanning start-ups, financial services, and e-commerce. This strategic appointment will help us maximise value creation for our partners as we scale,» Mehta said in the statement.
Under-Insured Market
Tseng cited Igloo’s «ambitious growth» in using technology to tap Southeast Asia’s underinsured market.
Igloo said it obtained more than 30 partnerships across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines in 2021, with its gross written premium tripling during the period. The company said its goal was to facilitate 5 percent of the general insurance premiums in the region over the next five years.
Southeast Asia still has a large unbanked and underbanked population. Of the around 400 million adults in Southeast Asia, around 198 million are unbanked -- or don’t have a bank account -- while another 98 million are underbanked, with a bank account, but without access to credit, investments and insurance, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2019 report published by Google, Temasek and Bain & Co. in October 2019, prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
